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Posts Tagged ‘journals’:
Google scholar metrics
Google has produced another great tool for researchers, this time providing some metrics on journal citations. Google Scholar Metrics allows you to search on journals rather than articles, and to see the average or median h-index for each journal. For example, a search on “forecasting” yields the following results:
Following authors on Google Scholar
A great new feature has been added to Google Scholar Citations. For those authors who have set up a citations page, it is now possible to get email alerts for any new articles they publish, or for any new citations of their articles. So you can track citations to your own work this way, and stay up-to-date with key authors in your field. Setting up a Google Citations page is super-easy and was already worth doing. This new functionality is another reason to do it. After all, as researchers we want people to read our stuff, so we might as well make it as easy as possible for people to find what we write. To set up your Google Citations page, go to scholar.google.com/citations. To follow an author, find their citations page and look for the “Follow this author” box at the top right of the page. Hopefully, Google will add RSS feeds as an option in the future as I’d much rather get alerts that way then by yet more email in my inbox.
Refereeing a journal article
I’ve written briefly on this before. For an excellent and more detailed discussion of what is involved, there is a series of excellent posts on Pat Thomson’s blog: Refereeing a journal article part 1: reading Refereeing a journal article part 2: making a recommendation Refereeing a journal article part 3: writing the feedback If every reviewer followed her advice, my life as an editor would be much easier, and the quality of research would be improved.
Researcher portals
A researcher portal is a website that attempts to list all the publications of a given researcher. Some portals also allow sharing papers, interacting with other researchers, calculating citation statistics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these websites can be useful tools for getting your work noticed. They can also function as a de facto home page if you don’t already have a personal website. Conversely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field. However, unless a site provides a relatively complete list of your publications, and covers a large proportion of the research community in your discipline, it is of limited value.
The scourge of the academic publishers
Academic publishing is built on an old model where publishers were needed to print and distribute journals to libraries. Under this system, it makes sense that the journals are distributed by publishing companies who charge fees for their work. On the other hand, the academics who write for the journals, the peer reviewers and (almost all) editors, have always contributed their time and expertise without cost. Essentially, they are being paid by universities and other research organizations to do this work. While we had print-based distribution, this model largely worked. But now we work electronically, the model is broken.
Beware of junk journals and publishers
Today I received the following email: Dear Professor, 1. Antarctica Journal of Mathematics 2. Archimedes Journal of Mathematics 3. Bessel Journal of Mathematics 4. Cayley Journal of Mathematics 5. Diophantus Journal of Mathematics We are charging only $3 per page, which is very cheap when compared to some money oriented journals. Further we request you to withdraw your paper from other journals keeping in view of high page charges. You can submit your research papers to our online journals. We also consider paper from Statistics and Computer Science. I wonder how many mathematicians actually live in Antarctica for them to warrant their own journal!
Recommended survey papers
Survey articles are particularly helpful in getting a foothold in a new research area, or in looking for important papers that you may have overlooked. Whatever area of research you are in, look out for survey papers and journals dedicated to publishing survey papers.
Authorship ethics
With the constant pressure on academics to publish research papers, there is a temptation for research groups to include “coauthors” who have not really made any contribution to the manuscript. This seems more prevalent in some fields (e.g., the health sciences) than others. Occasionally, I am asked to add an author to a paper that has already been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Forecasting. I am very reluctant to do this as it is hard to imagine how someone could be left off a paper while it goes through several revisions, only to be remembered after the paper is accepted. It looks like a last ditch attempt to get someone a publication rather than a genuine research contribution. Most universities now have an authorship policy. The authorship policy at Monash University includes the following statements. Attribution of authorship … in all cases authorship must be based on making a substantial intellectual contribution to the work described and taking sole or joint responsibility for that contribution or, where appropriate, the work as a whole. Accordingly, authorship must be based upon a substantial contribution and responsibility for at least one, and usually more than one, of the following activities: Conception and design of the project; Analysis and interpretation of research data; Drafting
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Becoming a referee
I regularly get emails from people wanting to be referees for the International Journal of Forecasting, usually with an accompanying CV. This is not how the process works. Referees are almost always selected because they have previously written papers on a similar topic to the manuscript under review. If you want to be a referee, then write good papers and get them published in scholarly journals. Very quickly you will be invited to referee papers in the same journals. But until you have demonstrated your own research skills, no editor is going to trust you to assess the research of someone else.

Rob J Hyndman